tellectual creed, but are accustomed to say and feel that, without it as a solace and a hope to rest upon, this world would be stripped of its deepest fascinations. It is from minds of this age, whose vigor is unimpaired and whose relish for the joys of earth is most expansive, that the most glowing delineations of heaven usually proceed, and on whom the thirst for felicity and knowledge, which can be slaked at no earthly fountains, has the most exciting power. Then comes the busy turmoil of our mid career, when the present curtains off the future from our thoughts, and when a renewed existence in a different scene is recalled to our fancy chiefly in crises of bereavement. And finally, is it not the case that in our fading years when something of the languor and placidity of age is creeping over us, just when futurity is coming consciously and rapidly more near, and when one might naturally expect it to occupy us more incessantly and with more anxious and searching glances—we think of it less frequently, believe in it less confidently, desire it less eagerly than in our youth? Such, at least, has been my observation and experience, especially among the more reflective and inquiring order of men. The life of the hour absorbs us most completely, as the hours grow fewer and less full; the pleasures, the exemptions, the modest interests, the afternoon peace, the gentle affections of the present scene, obscure the future from our view, and render it, curiously enough, even less interesting than the past. To-day, which may be our last, engrosses us far more than to-morrow, which may be our FOREVER; and the grave into which we are just stepping down troubles us far less than in youth, when half a century lay between us and it.

What is the explanation of this strange phenomenon? Is it a merciful dispensation arranged by the Ruler of our life to soften and to ease a crisis which would be too grand and awful to be faced with dignity or calm, if it were actually realised at all? Is it that thought -or that vague substitute for thought which we call time—has brought us, half unconsciously, to the conclusion that the whole question is insoluble, and that reflection is wasted where reflection can bring us no nearer to an issue? Or

finally, as I know is true far oftener than we fancy, is it that threescore years and ten have quenched the passionate desire for life with which at first we stepped upon the scene? We are tired, some of us, with unending and unprofitable toil; we are satiated, others of us, with such ample pleasures as earth can yield us; we have had enough of ambition, alike in its successes and its failures; the joys and blessings of human affection on which, whatever their crises and vicissitudes, no righteous or truthful man will cast a slur, are yet so blended with pains which partake of their intensity; the thirst for knowledge is not slaked, indeed, but the capacity for the labor by which alone it can be gained has consciously died out; the appetite for life, in short, is gone, the frame is worn and the faculties exhausted; and possibly this is the key to the phenomenon we are examining-age CANNOT, from the very law of its nature, conceive itself endowed with the bounding energies of youth, and without that vigor both of exertion and desire, renewed existence can offer no inspiring charms. Our being upon earth has been enriched by vivid interests and precious joys, and we are deeply grateful for the gift; but we are wearied with one life, and feel scarcely qualified to enter on the claims, even though balanced by the felicities and glories, of another. It may be the fatigue which comes with age-fatigue of the fancy as well as of the frame; but somehow, what ye yearn for most instinctively at last is rest, and the peace which we can imagine the easiest because we know it best is that of sleep.

REV. BALDWIN BROWN.

The theologians appear to have fallen. upon evil days. Like some of old, they are filled with rebuke from all sides. They are bidden to be silent, for their day is over. But some things, like Nature, are hard to get rid of. Expelled, they 'recur' swiftly. Foremost among these is theology. It seems as if nothing could long restrain man from this, the loftiest exercise of his powers. The theologians and the Comtists have met in the sense which Mr. Huxley justly indicates; he is himself working at the foundations of a larger, nobler, and more complete theology. But for the present,

theology suffers affliction, and the theologians have in no small measure themselves to thank for it. The protest rises from all sides, clear and strong, against the narrow, formal, and, in these last days, selfish system of thought and expectation, which they have presented as their kingdom of Heaven to the world.

I never read Mr. Harrison's brilliant essays, full as they always are of high aspiration and of stimulus to noble endeavor, without finding the judgment which I cannot but pass in my own mind on his unbeliefs and denials, largely tempered by thankfulness. I rejoice in the passionate earnestness with which he lifts the hearts of his readers to ideals which it seems to me that Christianity that Christianity which as a living force in the Apostles' days turned the world upside down, that is, right side up, with its face towards heaven and God-alone can realise for man.

I recall a noble passage written by Mr. Harrison some years ago. A religion of action, a religion of social duty, devotion to an intelligible and sensible Head, a real sense of incorporation with a living and controlling force, the deliberate effort to serve an immortal Humanity-this, and this alone, can absorb the musings and the cravings of the spiritual man.'* It seems to me that it would be difficult for any one to set forth in more weighty and eloquent words the kind of object which Christianity proposes, and the kind of help towards the attainment of the object which the Incarnation affords. And in the matter now under debate,, behind the stern denunciation of the selfish striving towards a personal immortality which Mr. Harrison utters with his accustomed force, there seems to lie not only a yearning for, but a definite vision of, an immortality which shall not be selfish, but largely fruitful to public good. It is true that, as has been forcibly pointed out, the form which it wears is utterly vain and illusory, and wholly incapable, one would think, of accounting for the enthusiastic eagerness with which it appears to be sought. May not the eagerness be really kindled by a larger and more far-reaching vision -the Christian vision, which has become obscured to so many faithful servants of

*Fortnightly Review, vol. xii. p. 529.

duty by the selfishness and vanity with which much that goes by the name of the Christian life in these days has enveloped it; but which has not ceased and will not cease, in ways which even consciousness cannot always trace, to cast its spell on human hearts?

Mr. Harrison seems to start in his argument with the conviction that there is a certain baseness in this longing for immortality, and he falls on the belief with a fierceness which the sense of its baseness alone could justify. But surely he must stamp much more with the same brand. Each day's struggle to live is a bit of the baseness, and there seems to be no answer to Mr. Hutton's remark that the truly unselfish action under such conditions would be suicide. But at any rate it is clear from history that the men who formulated the doctrine and perfected the art of suicide in the early days of Imperial Rome, belonged to the most basely selfish and heartless generation that has ever cumbered this sorrowful world. The love of life is on the whole a noble thing, for the staple of life is duty. The more I see of classes in which at first sight selfishness seems to reign, the more am I struck with the measure in which duty, thought for others, and work for others, enters into their lives. The desire to live on, to those who catch the Christian idea, and would follow Him who came, not to be ministered unto, but to minister,' is a desire to work on, and by living to bless more richly a larger circle in a wider world.

I can even cherish some thankfulness for the fling at the eternity of the tabor in which Mr. Harrison indulges, and which draws on him a rebuke from his critics the severity of which one can also well understand. It is a last fling at the laus perennis, which once seemed so beautiful to monastic hearts, and which, looked at ideally, to those who can enter into Mr. Hutton's lofty view of adoration, means all that he describes. But practically it was a very poor, narrow, mechanical thing; and base even when it represented, as it did to multitudes, the loftiest form of a soul's activity in such a sad suffering world as this. I, for one, can understand, though I could not utter, the anathema which follows it as it vanishes from sight. And it bears closely on the matter in hand. It is no

dead mediæval idea. It tinctures strongly the popular religious notions of heaven. The favorite hymns of the evan gelical school are set in the same key. There is an easy, self-satisfied, self-indulgent temper in the popular way of thinking and praying, and above all of singing, about heaven, which, sternly as the singers would denounce the cloister, is really caught from the monastic choir. There is a very favorite verse which runs thus:

There, on a green and flowery mount,
Our weary souls shall sit,
And with transporting joys recount
The labors of our feet.*

It is a fair sample of the staple of much
pious forecasting of the occupations and
enjoyments of heaven. I cannot but
welcome very heartily any such shock as
Mr. Harrison administers to this restful
and self-centred vision of immortality.
Should he find himself at last endowed
with the inheritance which he refuses,
and be thrown in the way of these souls
mooning on the mount, it is evident that
he would feel tempted to give them a
vigorous shake, and to set them with
some stinging words about some good
work for God and for their world.
as many of us want the shaking now
badly enough, I can thank him for it, al-
though it is administered by an over-
rough and contemptuous hand.

And

I feel some hearty sympathy, too, with much which he says about the unity of the man. The passage to which I refer commences on page 632 with the words 'The philosophy which treats man as man simply affirms that man loves, thinks, acts, not that the ganglia, the senses, or any organ of man, loves, thinks, and acts.'

So far as Mr. Harrison's language and line of thought are a protest against the vague, bloodless, bodiless notion of the life of the future, which has more affinity with Hades than with Heaven, I heartily thank him for it. Man is an embodied spirit, and wherever his lot is cast he will need and will have the means of a spirit's manifestation to and action on its surrounding world. But this is precisely what is substantiated by the Resurrection. The priceless value of the truth * Mr. Martin's picture of the Plains of Heaven exactly present it, and it is a pic ture greatly admired in the circles of which we speak.

of the Resurrection lies in the close interlacing and interlocking of the two worlds which it reveals. It is the life which is lived here, the life of the embodied spirit, which is carried through the veil and lived there. The wonderful power of the Gospel of Jesus and the Resurrection' lay in the homely human interest which it lent to the life of the immortals. The risen Lord took up life just where He left it. The things which He had taught His disciples to care about here, were the things which those who had passed on were caring about there, the reign of truth, righteousness, and love. I hold to the truth of the Resurrection, not only because it appears to be firmly established on the. most valid testimony, but because it alone seems to explain man's constitution as a spirit embodied in flesh which he is sorely tempted to curse as a clog. It fur nishes to man the key to the mystery of the flesh on the one hand, while on the other it justifies his aspiration and realises his hope.

Belief in the risen and reigning Christ was at the heart of that wonderful uprising and outburst of human energy which marked the age of the Advent. The contrast is most striking between the sad and even despairing tone which breathes through the noblest heathen literature, which utters perhaps its deepest wail in the cry of Epictetus, 'Show me a Stoic

by heaven I long to see a Stoic,' and the sense of victorious power, of buoyant exulting hope, which breathes through the world and shines from the life of the infant Church. As dying, and behold we live; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things.' The Gospel which brought life and immortality to light won its way just as dawn wins its way, when 'jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops,' and flashes his rays over a sleeping world. Everywhere the radiance pene trates; it shines into every nook of shade; and all living creatures stir, awake, and come forth to bask in its beams. Just thus the flood of kindling light streamed forth from the Resurrection, and spread like the dawn in the morning sky; it touched all forms of things in a dark, sad world with its splendor, and called man forth from the tomb

in which his higher life seemed to be buried, to a new career of fruitful, sunlit activity; even as the Saviour prophesied, 'The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live.'

The exceeding readiness and joyfulness with which the truth was welcomed, and the measure in which Christendom —and that means all that is most powerful and progressive in human society has been moulded by it, are the most notable facts of history. Be it truth, be it fiction, be it dream, one thing is clear: it was a baptism of new life to the world which was touched by it, and it has been near the heart of all the great movements of human society from that day until now. I do not even exclude 'the Revolution,' whose current is under us still. Space is precious, or it would not be difficult to show how deeply the Revolution was indebted to the ideas which this gospel brought into the world. I entirely agree with Lord Blachford that Revelation is the ground on which faith securely rests. But the history of the quickening and the growth of Christian society is a factor of enormous moment in the estimation of the arguments for the truth of immortality. We are assured that the idea had the dullest and even basest origin. Man has a shadow, it suggested the idea of a second self to him he has memories of departed friends, he gave them a body and made them ghosts! Very wonderful surely, that mere figments should be the strongest and most productive things in the whole sphere of human activity, and should have stirred the spirit and led the march of the strongest, noblest, and most cultivated peoples; until now, in this nineteenth century, we think that we have discovered, as Miss Martineau tersely puts it, that'the theological belief of almost everybody in the civilised world is baseless.' Let who will believe it, I cannot.

It may be urged that the idea has strong fascination, that man naturally longs for immortality, and gladly catches at any figment which seems to respond to his yearning and to justify his hope. But this belief is among the clearest, broadest, and strongest features of his experience and history. It must flow out of something very deeply imbedded

in his constitution. If the force that is behind all the phenomena of life is responsible for all that is, it must be responsible for this also. Somehow man, the masterpiece of the Creation, has got himself wedded to the belief that all things here have relations to issues which lie in a world that is behind the shadow of death. This belief has been at the root of his highest endeavor and of his keenest pain; it is the secret of his chronic unrest. Now Nature through all her orders appears to have made all creatures contented with the conditions of their life. The brute seems fully satisfied with the resources of his world. He shows no sign of being tormented by dreams; his life withers under no blight of regret. All things rest, and are glad and beautiful in their spheres. Violate the order of their nature, rob them of their fit surroundings, and they grow restless, sad, and poor. A plant shut out from light and moisture will twist itself into the most fantastic shapes, and strain itself to ghastly tenuity; nay, it will work its delicate tissues through stone walls or hard rock, to find what its nature has made needful to its life. Having found it, it rests and is glad in its beauty once more. Living things, perverted by human intelligent effort, revert swiftly the moment that the pressure is removed. This marked tendency to reversion seems to be set in Nature as a sign that all (things are at rest in their natural conditions, content with their life and its sphere. Only in ways of which they are wholly unconscious, and which rob them of no contentment with their present, do they prepare the way for the higher developments of life.

What then means this restless longing in man for that which lies beyond the range of his visible world? Has Nature wantonly and cruelly made man, her masterpiece, alone of all the creatures restless and sad? Of all beings in the Creation must he alone be made wretch. ed by an unattainable longing, by futile dreams of a visionary world? This were an utter breach of the method of Nature in all her operations. It is impossible to believe that the harmony that runs through all her spheres fails and falls into discord in man. The very order of Nature presses us to the conviction that this insatiable longing which somehow she

generates and sustains in man, and which is unquestionably the largest feature of his life, is not visionary and futile, but profoundly significant; pointing with firm finger to the reality of that sphere of being to which she has taught him to lift his thoughts and aspirations, and in which he will find, unless the prophetic order of the Creation has lied to him, the harmonious completeness of his life.

And there seems to be no fair escape from the conclusion by giving up the order, and writing Babel on the world and its life. Whatever it is, it is not confusion. Out of its disorder, order palpably grows; out of its confusion arises a grand and stately progress. Progress is a sacred word with Mr. Harrison. In the progress of humanity he finds his longedfor immortality. But, if I may repeat in other terms a remark which I offered in the first number of this Review, while progress is the human law, the world, the sphere of the progress, is tending slowly but inevitably to dissolution. Is there discord again in this highest region? Mr. Harrison writes of an immortal humanity. How immortal, if the glorious progress is striving to accomplish itself in a world of wreck? Or is the progress that of a race born with sore but joyful travail from the highest level of the material creation into a higher region of being, whence it can watch with calmness the dissolution of all the perishable worlds?

The belief in immortality is so dear to man because he grasps through it the complement of his else unshaped and imperfect life. It seems to be equally the complement of this otherwise hopelessly jangled and disordered world. It is asked triumphantly: Why of all the hosts of creatures does man alone lay claim to this great inheritance? Because in man alone we see the experiences, the strain, the anguish, that demand it, as the sole key to what he does and endures. There is to me something horrible in the thought of such a life as ours, in which for all of us, in some form or other, the Cross must be the most sacred symbol, lived out in that bare, heartless, hopeless world of the material, to which Professor Clifford so lightly limits it. And I cannot but think that there are strong signs in many quarters of an almost fierce revulsion from the

ghastly drearihood of such a vision of life.

There seems to me to run through Mr. Harrison's utterances on these great subjects-I say it with honest diffidence of one whose large range of power I so fully recognise, but one must speak frankly if this Symposium is to be worth anything -an instinctive yearning towards Christian ideas, while that faith is denied which alone can vivify them and make them a living power in our world. There is everywhere a shadowy image of a Christian substance; but it reminds one of that formless form, wherein what seemed a head, the likeness of a kingly crown had on.' And it is characteristic of much of the finest thinking and writing of our times. The saviour Deronda, the prophet Mordecai, lack just that living heart of faith which would put blood into their pallid lineaments, and make them breathe and move among men. Again, I say that we have largely ourselves to thank for this saddening feature of the higher life of our times—we who have narrowed God's great kingdom to the dimensions of our little theological sphere. I am no theologian, though intensely interested in the themes with which the theologians occupy themselves. Urania, with darkened brow, may perhaps rebuke my prating. But I seem to see quite clearly that the sad strain and anguish of our life, social, intellectual, and spiritual, is but the pain by which great stages of growth accomplish themselves. We have quite outgrown our venerable, and in its time large and noble, theological shell. We must wait, not fearful, far less hopeless, while by the help of those who are working with such admirable energy, courage, and fidelity, outside the visible Christian sphere, that spirit in man which searches and cannot but search 'the deep things of God,' creates for itself a new instrument of thought which will give to it the mastery of a wider, richer, and nobler world.

Dr. W. G. WARD.

Mr. Harrison considers that the Christian's conception of a future life is so gross, so sensual, so indolent, so selfish,' as to be unworthy of respectful consideration. He must necessarily be intending to speak of this conception in the